Publications & Achievements
Receiving an Honorable Mention!
Great news! My poem, "Domesticity," just received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Western Michigan University Creative Writing Contest, in the graduate level division of poetry. Thank you, Adam Clay, for judging and for your recognition of my poem! It is...
Bees & Honey
It is spring, and what you expected of its beauty has not yet arrived. Things are still a little too dead to wake up & break open. Soon the flowers will act like small, color-blown cups for the insects and the rain. A.R. Ammons steps out into the great open...
Pomegranate
This is how it happens---he lifts the dress above your head and brings it down around your hands. You become a peacock, all feathers, all lace. You breathe deep, shrinking your frame as he fastens the eye-hook, zips up the dress. Then, the shoes---crows'...
Ultrasound
The body is pregnant with limbs and dismemberment---they tremble...
Umbrella: Customer Care
Humans are a series of feathers left inside-out. You are out in the rain, pacing from one eve to another, looking up at the splintered gutters, left cracked from last year’s Michigan winter. At the door, you take the world inside---one footprint from the dirt...
Tornado
Before you know it, the earth takes on an extra layer of skin. The wind is whipping, whistling, and when you look outside, you realize this is how everything communicates: We speak. We destroy. And then it’s over. The world may have a few more years---and then...
Tenacity
It’s this simple: the first relationship is nothing but a series of elephant bones--- the dust and chalk that stumbles through the mouth. The body is fragile, indiscriminate, pining for what is lost in a field, or has never been given. You spend your time...
She Wanted To Be An Airplane
Whether it was old wood or metal, it did not matter: it was the flight that was important, the escape and redemption of a sky over the house where she’d grown up, the shed where she sometimes hid in the middle of the night, watching for raccoons. She found a...
Poem of the Day & Reading Posts
Reading Kerrin McCadden
BECCA She says, It’s my birthday I’m going tomorrow. What’s your favorite font? What should I have him write? Serifs, I say, I like serifs. I like old typewriters---the keys little platters. I don’t answer the question about what to write. The vellum of...
Reading Jennifer K. Sweeney
ADOLESCENCE 1 In the scoliosis clinic, I waited in a room of skeletons while men reshaped the architecture of my sister, spongy discs stacked in S-curves like haunted seahorses, undulant when I shifted a protuberance side to side in my thumb and...
Reading Poems—The Art of Dabbling
Sometimes---particularly when life feels a little too busy, or the days need a little more structure (like the summer!)---I find myself immersed in the art of what I’ve come to call “dabbling.” This might mean simply browsing around on Google, or the newest...
Reading Joan Aleshire
TWELVE FAIRY GODMOTHERS all came with gifts to the birth: one with laughter, one with strength, one with luck, one with love, one with grace, one with hope, one with imagination, one with insight, one with health, one with keen senses, one with will, and...
Reading Frank Stanford
THE BASS He jumps up high against the night, rattling his gills and the hooks in his back. The Indian says he is like a goose passing in front of the moon. THE NOCTURNAL SHIPS OF THE PAST There was always a great darkness moving out like a...
Reading Matthew Dickman
GRIEF When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla you must count yourself lucky. You must offer her what’s left of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish you must put aside and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed, her eyes moving from...
Reading Mary Ruefle
WASPS’ NEST The empty, almost weightless, onionated brain. Planet-on-a-branch. The first lantern to glow in space when Wang Bo thought, I’ll look a little closer I’ll lift this flame inside. His footsteps. His panting. His words of announcement: how...
A Day Reading Robert Creeley
IN A BOAT SHED I waited too long. I waited for you forever and ever: the changing unchanging restlessness of the signs they didn’t put up or down; the boxes of oranges, rat poisons, barns, a sled with no runners, snow, refreshments, pineapples; the odor...
Book Reviews & Author Interviews
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Past Literary Events
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